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2 Rutherford County students part of Tennessee Tech team to name Martian crater

Submitted by Tennessee Tech
Published 11:50 a.m. CT April 30, 2018

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The first photo from the European Space Agency’s probe is of an icy crater on Mars.
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A group of researchers at Tennessee Tech have named a carter on Mars after a city in Ghana in Africa. Two of theteam members are Rutherford County residents Ben Holladay and Hannah Hannah Blaylock.(Photo: SUBMITTED)

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. — Two Rutherford County students have made their mark on the galaxy as part of a Tennessee Tech University team studying Mars.

The researchers have named a Martian crater as part of their work on a NASA-funded project to map a geological structure on Mars unlike any found on Earth.

TTU assistant earth sciences professor Jeanette Wolak is working on the Mars mapping project which will produce the first-ever published map of a terraced fan. The fan is located in what will now be known as Garu Crater, a name Wolak submitted to the International Astronomical Union and recorded in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

Working alongside Wolak are earth sciences students Hannah Blaylock of Murfreesboro and Ben Holladay of La Vergne. The student group has focused on the mapping and logging of features on the surface of Mars, along with processing digital images gathered by Mars orbiters.

“It’s exciting. I was also nervous about naming it something good,” Wolak said. “You want to pick a name that you’re going to enjoy putting on the map, but I think my favorite part was how collaborative the naming process was, talking through it with my students and colleague, Joseph (Asante).”

The IAU allows the naming of features in the solar system based on a set of guidelines. First, there has to be scientific significance to the naming. Wolak’s mapping project checked that box. The project is looking at a terraced fan, a specific Martian structure indicating an area where water channels once were, that is located inside a crater that was previously unnamed. These fan formations are unlike Earth’s river deltas, leaving researchers to explore how they are formed.

This NASA-funded mapping project will produce the first-ever published scientific investigation map of one of these structures. So, the crater where it is located needed a name.

The IAU also requires that craters less than 60 kilometers in diameter be named after a small town of less than 10,000 people.

“They asked us to pick a name from an underrepresented country, a country that didn’t have a lot of names already recorded, and I looked at the list and one of the countries on there was Ghana,” Wolak said.

Asante, also an assistant professor of earth sciences at the university, is from Ghana. He recommended the name Garu, a small farming town on the edge of the Sahara Desert desert that struggles with water during Ghana’s dry season.

“I thought it was perfect because Joseph is a hydrogeologist who studies water, and Mars doesn’t have a lot of water,” Wolak said.

With the town of Garu’s water struggles, it seemed fitting that its sister location on Mars be a crater that is home to a structure believed to have been formed by water as well.

“They don’t have water year-round,” Asante said. “When we have winter here, it is dry season in Ghana. Water is a big issue in northern Ghana.”

Wolak submitted an application to have the name officially recorded and it was approved and recorded in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature in April.

Garu Crater is located near the Gale Crater, which is currently being explored by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity.